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Max van der Stoel

The first OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities
The Max van der Stoel Award is presented by the Government of the Netherlands every two years. It honours the memory of distinguished Dutch statesman and the first OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel (seen here in Vukovar, Croatia). (OSCE) Photo details

Max van der Stoel (1924–2011) was appointed as the first OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) in 1992. He served eight and a half years in the post.

Van der Stoel was a senior statesman who had a long and distinguished career. He was twice Foreign Minister of the Netherlands (1973–1977 and 1981–1982) and held seats in both the upper and lower houses of the Dutch Parliament. He was a member of the European Parliament (1971–1973) and twice a member of the North Atlantic Assembly (1968–1973 and 1978–1981) as well as a Member of the Council of Europe Consultative Assembly and a member of the Western European Union Assembly between 1967 and 1972. He served as Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the United Nations between 1983 and 1986, and in 1992 he was appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights as Special Rapporteur on Iraq.

Van der Stoel became familiar with the work of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE, now the OSCE) as Foreign Minister during the Helsinki consultations from 1973 to 1975, as Chairman of the Netherlands Helsinki Committee for several years, and as the Netherlands head of delegation during the CSCE conferences on the human dimension in Paris, Copenhagen and Moscow. In December 1992, he was appointed as the first HCNM, taking up his duties in January 1993. After two renewals of his mandate as HCNM, he was succeeded by Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekéus in July 2001.

In 1999, van der Stoel was awarded the House Order of the Golden Lion of Nassau; the first citizen of the Netherlands to receive the award since 1919. He was also appointed Chairman of the Working Table on Democratisation and Human Rights for the Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe in the same year. Several honorary doctorates were awarded to him, including the Cleveringa Chair at Leiden University. The Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award at the University of Tilburg is named in his honour.

The Max van der Stoel Award

In 2001 the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs established an award of EUR 50,000 named in honour of Max van der Stoel. It is awarded biennially to an individual or an institution in recognition of extraordinary and outstanding achievements aimed at improving the position of national minorities in the OSCE participating States.